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I sincerely thank all of you for the texts, references, hints and clues I have received by many of you either via Email or this blog. Due to your efforts, I have not only more material to work with, but also many new ideas on how to proceed with my Master thesis. If any of you comes across more texts connected to this topic or has any more thoughts on the topic itself, please do not hesitate to contact me.

A publication of the nineteenth century is J. ter Gouw, ‘Wapens en wapenlegenden’, in: Dietsche warande 5 (1860), p. 443-474. He refers, among others, to the text on the panelpaintings from the counts of Holland, made in the late fifteenth century and commissioned by Maximilian of Habsburg, where a herald explains that the coat of arms of the counts of Holland has a Trojan origin (via a French prince of Aquitanië, see my article ‘Aquitanië en de herkomst van de Hollandse graven, een 14e-eeuwse traditie’, in: D.E.H. de Boer, E.H.P. Cordfunke en F.W.N. Hugenholtz (ed.), Holland in wording. De ontstaansge-schiede¬nis van het graafschap Holland tot het begin van de vijftiende eeuw (Hilversum, 1991), Muiderberg symposia 5, 125-142.). The panelpaintings are now kept in the city hall of Haarlem. See for an introduction and edition of the text Wim van Anrooij (and others)(ed.), De Haarlemse gravenportretten. Hollandse geschiedenis in woord en beeld. Hilversum, 1997, Middeleeuwse studies en bronnen 49.

In the late fifteenth century a short poem of praise in Middle Dutch on the Brabantine city Antwerp was written by an anonymous author. The poem contains an explanation of the coat of arms of Antwerp. It was edited by L.G. Visscher (ed.), Bijdragen tot de oude letteren der Nederlanden. Vol. 2 (Utrecht, 1839), p. 427-430. See Google Books.

In the chronicle of Brabant (Cornicke van Brabant), written c. 1415 by the Brabantine clerk Hennen van Merchtenen, the author explains the history of the coat of arms of Brabant, which has a Trojan origin. The coat of Arms of Brabants goes back to the coat of arms of the Trojan Hector. The author also explains (in the context of a Brabantine variant of the story of the Swan Knight/Lohengrin-tradition) that Julius Caesar adopted the eagle in his coat of arms (the origin of the coat of arms of the German empire) after he has shot an eagle above Aarschot (a place now situated in Belgium; Dutch ‘aar’ = English ‘eagle’; Dutch ‘schot’ is from the verb ‘schieten’ = English ‘to shoot’). The chronicle of Hennen van Merchtenen has been edited in 1896. A digitized version of this edition is available on the internet: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/henn004corn01_01/downloads.php. On the Trojan origin of Brabant, see the dissertation (cum laude) of Wilma Keesman (Universiteit van Amsterdam) which has not been published yet. See on Hennen van Merchtenen, among others, my publications ‘De literaire ambities van Hennen van Merchtenen’, in: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 109 (1993), 291-314; ‘Zwaanridder en historiografie bij Hennen van Merchtenen’, in: Spiegel der Letteren 36 (1994), 279-306; ‘Het wapen van Godfried met de Baard bij Hennen van Merchtenen’, in: Spiegel der Letteren 38 (1996), 189-191 and ‘Merchtenen, Hennen van’, R.G. Dunphy (red.), Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. Dl. 2, Leiden–Boston, 2010, 1105.

A medieval example from the Netherlands is the story of the origins of the coat of arms of Haarlem (during crusade-activities in Damiate, Egypt, in the early thirteenth century, in which inhabitants of the city were taking part), a city in the county of Holland. The story is recorded for the first time by the Dutch poet Dirk Mathijsz. [=Dirk, the son of Mathijs] in a poem of praise on the city of Haarlem. The poem is written in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. J.D. Rutgers van der Loeff (ed.), Drie lofdichten op Haarlem. Het Middelnederlandsch gedicht van Dirk Mathijszen en Karel van Mander’s twee beelden van Haarlem (Haarlem, 1911). On Dirk Mathijsz. and his poem of praise on Haarlem, see my article ‘Middeleeuwse sporen van de Haarlemse Damiate-legende’, in: E.K. Grootes (ed.), Haarlems Helicon. Literatuur en toneel te Haarlem vóór 1800 (Hilversum, 1993), 11-25 (with references to later medieval and early modern sources containing or using the same story).

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The collaborative blog Heraldica Nova is an initiative of the Dilthey-Project ‘Die Performanz der Wappen’ (University of Münster) which aims to study medieval and early modern heraldry from the perspective of cultural history. Read more ...